"I dreamed about you!"
She screams, her voice cracking into a shrill, panicked note as her chin dips, a millimeter from the surface.
"Before I even knew you existed... I felt like someone was missing. I wanted to find you. I wanted us to be... a family."
I circle her slowly until I am standing right at the edge of the vat. I lean over, my face inches from hers, so she can see the absolute void in my pupils.
"Family is the leash Charles used to drag me through hell," I whisper, my breath hot against her sweating skin.
"Every bedtime story he read to you was a night I spent screaming in a sensory deprivation tank. My own mother didn’t even know he had another woman. You want to be my sister? Fine. Then share the pain."
"You... you're just hurting," she says, her eyes searching mine for a spark of humanity that isn't there.
"I can help you. We can stop him together. Please... don't do this to me. I'm your... little sister."
“Manipulating me with sentiment is like trying to set fire to a stone, Lucy. You're wasting the last of your oxygen."
I reach out and adjust the valve on the dripping pipe. The green surface rises, hungry and impatient.
I turn the monitor so Lucy can see the live feed of Madeline’s car racing through the industrial zone. She’s close. Smart girl. So she figured out why I left the key for her.
"Look at her, Lucy. Look at the woman who is going to watch you dissolve because she refused to belong to me. She isn't your savior. She is the reason you're in this vat."
Lucy closes her eyes, her head finally sagging from sheer exhaustion and her chin touches the surface. She screams. Araw, guttural sound of pure agony as the acid eats into her skin. She jerks her head back up, her body convulsing, her face a mask of tears and chemical burns.
I press the button on the console, patching my voice directly into Madeline’s car speakers. I watch her on the perimeter camera. She is idling at the gates, her silhouette frozen behind the windshield.
Inside the room, the sound of the dripping acid is a metronome of death. Lucy is whimpering now, her head jerking convulsively to stay above the rising green tide. The burn on her chin is an angry, weeping red.
"Stop the car, Madeline," I command, my voice echoing in both the room and her dashboard.
"Don't move another inch."
"Deimos!"
Her voice crackles back, distorted by the encrypted link, but sharp with a desperate, new kind of steel.
"Let her go. I'm here. I'm alone."
"You are never alone, Doctor. You carry your morality like a shroud," I say, leaning against the vat, feeling the heat of the chemical reaction against my lower back.
She found out about the kidnapping faster than I expected and she even remembers the road to my own sanctuary. I don't tell her that Lucy’s muscles are currently shredding themselves to stay alive. I don't tell her that one sneeze, one lapse in concentration, and her 'best friend' becomes a memory.
"I'm giving you the final revision of the design," I continue, staring at the monitor that shows Madeline’s pale face.
"You chose her in your apartment. You threw me out. Now, I need to know if you can actually live with that choice. Or if you’re ready to admit that I’m the only one who can keep you whole."
There is a long, suffocating silence.
On the screen, I see Madeline close her eyes. She takes a breath, and when she opens them, the panic is gone. It is replaced by a cold, flat resignation that even makes me pause.
"I'm done, Deimos," she whispers.
"I'm done fighting you. You want the truth? You won. The week of silence... It broke me. I can't do this without you. I don't want to."
Lucy gasps, her eyes fly open at the sound of Madeline’s voice.
"Mali... no..." she moans, but her voice is too weak to carry through the mic.
